Make Vol. 18 -- building a sustainable future at home
The theme for MAKE Vol. 18 (on newsstands and in bookstores on May 18) is about building a sustainable future at home. The articles include geeked-out gardening tips (like an Arduino-controlled automatic indoor garden called the Garduino, micro-irrigation, and worm composting) and lots of energy related projects (like how to make a Tweet-a-Watt so you can twitter your electricity usage, and other ways to measure and reduced power usage in your home).
One of the projects in the magazine I'm looking forward to making myself is the solar powered hot tub heater. Eric Muhs, the author, built a 3' x 3' plywood box, painted it black, drilled a couple of holes in a corner, and dropped a 100 foot coil of cheap black vinyl hose inside. The ends of the hoses go into the water, and a solar-powered pump moves water through the coils. The cool thing Eric's design is that the pump stays off when it's dark or cloudy, preventing the system from cooling the hot tub water.
Eric says, "On a sunny day, it works great, and the water returns to the tub 2 or 3 degrees hotter than it left. That may not sound like much, but it adds up. The basic rule of thumb of this system: if it's the kind of day when your parked car is hotter than the outside air when you get in, you'll get heat."
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So if it's a day when you'd really like a cold bath, the hot tub will work great!
And when you're all done, you can celebrate your contribution to the environment by taking a trip to Europe on Virgin Air!
@2 Only if they have a solar hot tub on board the aircraft, silly!
Here's a clue - if you're interested in protecting the environment and reducing your energy use, get rid of your hot tub.
Bitter, bitter people here tonight...
coop
I think there's some validity for trying to find ways to conserve energy without living an austere
life without luxuries. Getting rid of the hot tub
would conserve energy, but it a person wants to have
a hot tub, then a solar hot tub heater is a good
idea.
My concern is of what chemicals would leach into the water from the vinyl hose. Lots of pools have vinyl liners, though.
A printing factory where I used to work ran lake water through a heat exchanger to cool the building.
I'm curious about the possibility of using that same concept to use a swimming pool to cool a house. Also, why not route the water going to an office building's water heater a heat exchanger
in the server room to reduce the energy needed
to both cool the server room and heat the water?
Tobergill: I'm curious, how many hours a day do you have to pedal that electricity-generating bike of yours to power your computer so you can use the Internet?
That's what the monkeys are for.
Will this issue contain the dronestick instructions?
If you don't agree with such things, you needn't have them; for most of us, the point is NOT to leave no footprint whatsoever, but to live a sustainable AND agreeable life.
If to live ethically one must live a life devoid of any pleasure, then there's no point to living, is there?
Coop ~ don't let others' lack of vision cloud your own...
Lanval
I'd ditch the plastic tubing (conducts heat poorly) for some junk auto radiators- flushed out, of course. Then add aluminum-foil reflectors to bounce more infrared into the box.
Actually, I'd have to get a hot tub first.
Mark, his computer is powered solely by the latent heat of digestion from all the fallen fruit he eats. (The end product of which smells like roses, naturally.) It's also a neural connection to the internet, powered only by his cutting intellect.
I am in the midst of buying a house that comes with a hot tub... I wouldn't ordinarily buy one, but it's kind of a nice idea. Maybe I'll try a solar collector to see if it helps with the energy usage.
If we're going to compare penis size .. err, energy usage .. then let's put up a copy of our electric bills, Tobergill. Last month I used 355 KWH.
How many monkey-hours does that convert into?
I find it a super idea for the Make magazine - actually the themes I had hoped that would be dealt with in the next issue(s)!
Now, another idea for a theme for Make: why, in these times not consider a magazine where all projects use at least 70 or 80% of salvaged material!
Recycle-reuse and good tips how to do this.
Lanval/Anon,
Don't worry, they don't.
coop
Hey Mark,
This looks fantastic - do you know where you can get MAKE in the UK?
Mitch @#6,
One of Toronto's neat little secrets is a Deep Lake Water Cooling system that cools many of downtown's major office towers with heat exchangers powered by water from deep in Lake Ontario.
I'm also trying to work out how to build a heat exchanger that will help cool my house while warming my swimming pool.
Another thought: using to the heat that builds up in the attic.